Well. It was an understatement if the worker who tweets from Fukushima I Nuke Plant is correct. He says they went back to test the locations again with the meter that can measure up to 40,000 ppm. The meter maxed out.

It is over 40,000 ppm, or over 4%.

The media and TEPCO reported the number as "over 10,000 ppm", which is technically correct. "Over 40,000 ppm" is definitely over 10,000 ppm.

And today [September 23; they knew about "over 10,000 ppm" the day before] we went to measure using the meter that can measure up to 4%. It was 4% max. So the work [to cut the pipe] was canceled, and TEPCO made an announcement. I didn't know, as I'm not very knowledgeable about chemistry, but it seems there's a chance of explosion if hydrogen gas is more than 4%.

He is wondering if zirconium cladding is still melting and reacting, producing hydrogen.

But as one reader of this blog points out after putting two posts from yesterday together (the one about Reactor 4 SFP water radiolysis and the one about the hydrogen detection in the Reactor 1 CV pipe), it may be possible that the water radiolysis is happening somewhere deep inside the reactor building where boiling water is getting irradiated and generating hydrogen gas.

19
comments:

Atomfritz
said...

Awwww... the nightmare goes on.

Let's pray that this is only one hydrogen pocket in tubes leading upwards.But, I catch myself by being over-optimistic in fear.Just think of what happens when this pipe bursts. The RPV would vent its gases to the areas outside the containment vessel in RB #1.This would finally render the RB#1 inaccessible (many sieverts/h would be everywhere due to precipitated contaminants) and thus make also the SFP inaccessible by "carbon-based robots", inevitably calling for a new big catastrophe.

It took 500,000 people to bury Chernobyl--and that was just 1 reactor, which had exploded.

Russia accomplished this in one month.

Why is Japan (and the international community) accepting a half-assed effort on TEPCO's part to clean-up 3 reactors and a damaged spent fuel pool--all of which have either exploded and/or breached their containment?

I would really like to know why people are tolerating this.

Is TEPCO really that powerful? Are they so untouchable, that every other Japanese company will not yank them back into line?

Every single company in Japan has had their profits plummet due to TEPCO's irresponsibility.

TEPCO placed a nuclear plant--full of safety violations--on a faultline. Everyone knows, now, it was simply the earthquake which caused these meltdowns...not the tsunami.

One company has ruined lives--but even if the cold-hearted bureaucrats don't care about human suffering--I think they understand money.

Is every corporate business in Japan willing to lose everything, because TEPCO was and continues to be lazy and stupid?

I'm just wondering...

I mean...are all businesses just going to hand over their money to TEPCO for destroying Japan?

I think there needs to be an intervention.

The same private company--which destroyed Japan--should not be trusted to clean-up the damage.

I would think even the sleazy, corrupt politicians in Japan would have some sense of self-preservation.

I think if you conduct business in Japan, it's time to exercise whatever influence you have to save your country. Even if you move to the south of the island--your profits will disappear, like sand, if you don't do something.

Call in the military and bury those reactors. Do it now, before you all die or go bankrupt.

I think you'll find that it took a bit longer than a month to build the sarcophagus in Chernobyl. And, unfortunately, it needs to be rebuilt (or covered with something even bigger). And, its covering something like 1000 sieverts of radioactive debris, which, compared to the 10-20 sieverts that everyone is freaking out about in Fukushima, is a whole different level of freak-out.

I think it's because the IQ in Japan is substatialy lower than world IQ statistics would have us believe,aiming for an IQ of about 60% as a corporate 'person' is a stupid idea and not a thing anyone i know would care for.

fukushima now rates as the most raioactive place on the planet....google the list and check it out. damn scary whats out there bleeding toxicty into the oceans and atmosphere. and people worry about the global warming farce. got much bigger problems, that actually exist folks.

6:22 I would not call the IQ for an explanation. I don' t think their IQ is different from others. To me there is a kind of mind control acting here. But not only Japan is affected by that, it is almost everywhere nowadays. That's the only way I can explain the aphaty of Japanese people and that of the international community as a whole. I don't believe in man's stupidity, I cannot believe it can reach such levels, no, and not collectively like that.

Well, switching to solar power would solve both, the radiation crisis and the "global warming farce" (which everyone knows is a real problem, actually...but I agree, getting rid of nuclear should be the priority.) And we could also get rid of "fracking" for natural gas.

I completely agree with the anonymous poster calling for burial of the whole site at Daiichi and have been calling for that myself since 3/11. Intervention by sober adults needs to happen to take control of this site away from the incompetent criminals who caused the problem and refuse to stop the radioactive releases with prompt burial. The government could take it over and bury the mess under a big mountain of sand. The critical problem at Chernobyl did not however become resolved by human intervention or the sarcophagus. What actually happened is the melted fuel vitrified the sand insulation that joined it in the basement of the plant under the reactor to form corium a stable solution to nuclear meltdown because it prevents criticality due to the glassy matrix separating the fuel. Corium appears in the basement of the Chernobyl sarcophagus as large pahoehoe 'elephants feet' and the Russians were even able to approach these formations and film them. Most western 'scientists' today have no knowledge of corium as a natural steady state solution to nuclear meltdown. It is kind of like most economists today have no idea how money is created out of nothing and charged at interest to the people, but I digress. The basic stupidity of all the nuclear engineers about corium and what to do in a meltdown--bury the mess deep as you can and turn off the fire hoses and the the water flooding--is why TEPCO has never been able to figure out what to do. Like the poster said, if the rest of Japan wants to save their nation, they best get involved in INTERVENTION to bury this mess.

quote:"Where is Japan's military?It took 500,000 people to bury Chernobyl--and that was just 1 reactor, which had exploded.Russia accomplished this in one month." quote end

“THE MAKE-SHIFT concrete shelter hastilythrown up in the months after the explosion isoften referred to as a “sarcophagus”, a funeralterm made even more fitting by the fact that ithouses the body of at least one plant workerwho rescuers were unable to recover.The official short-term death toll from theaccident was 31 but many more people diedof radiation-related sicknesses such as cancer.The total death toll and long-term healtheffects remain a subject of intense debateeven 25 years after the disaster"(The disaster) brought suffering on millionsof people,” said the Emergency Ministry’sHolosha.“About 600,000 people were involved in mitigating the consequences of the accident.About 300,000 of them were Ukrainians. Outof those, 100,000 are disabled now.”http://graphics.thomsonreuters.com/specials/Chernobyl.pdf

The sarcophagus was not started before may 86 and was finished in November 86. Between April and May, houndreds of people worked there to clan up, digging a tunnel below the reactor and so on...Please stick to the facts and let the pro-nukes falsify the facts. Everybody fighting against nuclear power and weapons should be as accurate as possible in my opinion.

I'm not pro-nuke at all, but for me the "option" to send in there thousands of people by force of orders seems rather inhuman. That's the problem with nuclear desasters in democracies: you simply cannot order people to do the dirty jobs. This would be the same in any country worldwide. One more reason to stop that insanity...

The 500k people were not all engaged in building the Chernobyl sarcophagus (a relative handful of construction workers did so) but were engaged in clearing radioactive material from the site and either burying it or putting it back inside the broken plant.

The Soviets did not entomb the reactor which entombed itself, a consequence of its design. The reactor pile was surrounded by sand which flowed from its containment and mixed with molten fuel. The sand+fuel became a glassy 'lava' that is within the Chernobyl basement right now.

Japan isn't making a maximum effort to separate the fuel in Fukushima Daiichi from the outside world. Simply pumping in water an hoping isn't a strategy. They are running out of places to put the water which has become intensely radioactive. Water vapors also transport radionuclides to the atmosphere which is why Japan becomes more radioactive by the day.

Japan/TEPCO is in the dark: they don't know where the cores are. They don't know what makes up the cores: fuel (+400 tons), pressure vessel material, concrete, seawater, 'dirt' and 'rock' ... all in a witches brew. Nobody knows what happens when TEPCO stops pumping water or sand is pumped in with the water. The reactors might cool down and rad levels drop or the reactors might blow up in steam explosions.

TEPCO pretends, hoping radioactive decay cools the reactors soon, allowing them to be covered up and forgotten.

Problems w/ covering up is spent fuel cannot be removed from pools.

Buildings are too radioactive to work within so roof debris cannot be cleared away.

More radiation spews from the reactors every day, in very large amounts.

Japan needs to get TEPCO out of cleanup and internationalize it. Russians and Americans have more experience w/ cleaning radiation messes. I'm surprised nobody has modeled the meltdown. Models can be used to create the best cleanup/entombment strategy.

@anon 1;46PM, yes people are working inside the high-radiation reactor building, which houses the Containment Vessel which houses the clearly broken Reactor Pressure Vessel. No one has entered the Containment Vessel ever since the accident, and this hydrogen is probably leaking from the Containment Vessel to the pipe.

About my coverage of Japan Earthquake of March 11

I am Japanese, and I not only read Japanese news sources for information on earthquake and the Fukushima Nuke Plant but also watch press conferences via the Internet when I can and summarize my findings, adding my observations.

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Well, this was, until March 11, 2011. Now it is taken over by the events in Japan, first earthquake and tsunami but quickly by the nuke reactor accident. It continues to be a one-person (me) blog, and I haven't even managed to update the sidebars after 5 months... Thanks for coming, spread the word.------------------This is an aggregator site of blogs coming out of SKF (double-short financials ETF) message board at Yahoo.

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